Berlin Word Watcher Wins Challenge With Eight Homograms

Word Watch

June 19, 2014|By ROB KYFF, Special To The Courant

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that Mark Friden of Cranberry Lake, N.Y., had invented a new category of words he calls "homograms" — words that not only sound alike (homophones) but that are also anagrams (words containing the same letters). As examples, Mark cited bear/bare, meet/mete, hose/hoes, ware/wear, tear/tare, axle/axel and rose/roes.

I then asked readers to send in their own homograms, as well as original palindromes (phrases spelled the same backward and forward) and promised to send a copy of my book "Word Up! A Lively Look at English" to the best entry in each category.

Since then, the entries have been, well, scrambling in.

In the homogram category, Moreland Houck of Trenton, N.J., Gigi King of Paonia, Colo., and Eileen Davis of Allison Park, Pa., all cited pear/pare, with Ellen adding does/dose, though the sound match is a bit of a stretch.

Connie Haskell of Suffield came up with eke/eek.

Richard Guttman of Vernon generated rude/rued and peek/peke (a short term for a Pekingese dog). Trish Kelleher of Rochester, N.Y., offered feet/fete, while Moreland Houck, came up with nose/noes (the plural of "no").

But the "Word Up!" winner is Esther Woodruff of Berlin who came up with eight homograms: sere/seer, discreet/discrete, stake/steak, pried/pride, tied/tide, pare/pear, great/grate and break/brake.

My request for palindromes also had readers running back and forth.

(Cathey Kuhn of Douglasville, Ga., noted that my call for palindromes was perfectly timed because it fell amid nine full days of palindromic dates: 4/11/14 through 4/19/14.)

Emailer Sam Walls passed along a palindrome presented by math whiz Danica McKellar on "The Tonight Show" with Jimmy Fallon. It describes what's found on the floor of an alien spaceship — Gross-out Trigger Alert! — "Tons of UFO snot."

Charlie Kiniston of Unionville created "Bert Adam saw dad was mad at reb," and hopefully added the palindromic "Now I won."

But the actual "Word Up!" winner – by a "hare" – is Paul Dumont of New Britain. His entry is "Tender animals slam in a red net," which makes me think of tiny bunnies dunking basketballs.

The first round of this contest is over, but if there are still a few of you who can conjure up any more original homograms or palindromes, please send them my way for a new epoch of fun. Or, to phrase my request as a palindrome, "Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?"